Human rights, conservation and Indigenous peoples

Sustainable trajectories that achieve biodiversity and sustainable development goals need to maintain or enhance ecosystem services on which livelihoods depend as concerns Indigenous Peoples and land-based (and often poor) people living in or adjacent to all classes of protected areas. Achieving large-scale engagement of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) in protected areas governance entails (a) recognition of and compensation for historical wrongs and transgressions of rights in conservation contexts; (b) IPLC-led planning, decision-making and consent (which is significant and robust); and (c) connection of local efforts with larger

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connected landscapes/seascapes to enable the continued benign use of ecosystem services in broader landscapes and seascapes. Human rights are linked to but not inclusive of the rights of nature across these considerations.

Evidence

Some conservation efforts have led to indigenous and local peoples being displaced from traditional territories and deprived of access to resources essential to their livelihood (West and Brockington, 2006; Agrawal and Redford, 2009; see also Chapters 3 and 6). This was true across many colonial administrations wherein reserves were often created as hunting reserves or settler communities (Griffiths and Robin, 1997; Neumann, 1998). These reserves impinged upon forest and land-dependent communities (Duffy et al., 2015). There are also reports of similar patterns of restrictions and conflicts with contemporary pastoralists (Holmern et al., 2007), and swidden agriculturalists (Harper, 2003). As conservation efforts have escalated in the contemporary period, this pattern has continued, with some exceptions (Davies et al., 2013). International organizations in the last two decades have come to recognize that the involvement of local people is an essential prerequisite of any attempt to achieve better conservation and natural resource management (Kakabadse, 1993; McNeely, 1995). However, there have been ongoing reports of violent and militarized conservation including shoot-to-kill orders issued for poachers (Lunstrum, 2014). Recent examples come from the USA, Cambodia and southern African countries (Ramutsindela, 2016), including cases where relocation has failed and violence has escalated as a partial consequence (Hubschle, 2017).

In many countries, both in global north and south, the processes of allocating land rights are still a work in progress. People with legitimate and historical rights to territorial use and jurisdiction have often had difficulty gaining recognition of these rights in processes of land allocation.

Misidentifying people as stakeholders rather than rights-holders has often enabled human rights abuses by lessening the obligations of duty bearers (those responsible to protect and enable viable conditions such that human rights are ensured) (Alcorn & Royo, 2007). Failure to

recognize the presence and role of historical wrongs has often deepened or exacerbated tensions about or the creation of just forms of conservation (Chan and Satterfield, 2013). This has

included histories of displacement often linked to ‘fortress conservation’ (Büscher, 2016), forced relocation and loss of livelihoods (Brockington and Igoe, 2006); colonial legacies, transgression of treaty rights, and failed restitution for historical losses (Colchester, 2004). The designation of protected areas without meaningful involvement of those most affected (Hockings et al., 2006) has been widespread, so much so that some populations are not aware that they are living within a designated protected area and that conditions of use have thus changed (Sundberg, 2006).

Pressure from national and international organizations related to human rights and to

conservation has placed pressure on policymakers in countries with rich biodiversity, sometimes with undesirable effects. Even attempts to achieve conservation via community-based

management have not always fully addressed the fundamental rights of local people, even in better designed systems such as those known as community-based conservation (Campbell and

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Vainio-Mattila, 2003; Berkes, 2004). Cernea and Soltau (2006) have documented cases where conservation has deepened poverty and food insecurity as a result of restrictions imposed on resource use, most acutely in cases of forced relocation or involuntary resettlements. Sachs et al.

(2009) have documented cases where a disproportionate conservation burden has been placed on already poor and marginal communities thereby increasing transitions into more severe forms of poverty.

The loss or degradation of social status has also accompanied conservation activities, often due to the relocation of peoples to hostile host communities (Martin, 2005) or the stigmatizion of some peoples because their land-use practices are deemed destructive by conservation agents (Bocarejo & Ojeda, 2016). Compensation for losses directly attributable to conservation (e.g., due to loss of lands, or loss of resources or income as the result of human-wildlife conflicts) have often been insufficient (Cernea and Soltau, 2006) or have failed to recognize losses most

meaningful to impacted communities (Witter and Satterfield, 2014). Communities have often waited far too long in far too compromising circumstances for promised relocation packages when being moved to improve the status of parks and protected areas (Hubshle, 2017). Last, when conservation efforts have been poorly executed due to problems of governance, corruption, or in areas with histories of war and armed conflict, violent and militarized conservation has often ensued and harmed human and nonhuman communities (Smith et al., 2015).

Given the vast lands over which IPLCs exercise traditional rights, recognizing land rights and partnering with Indigenous Peoples could greatly benefit conservation efforts (Garnett et al., 2018). According to Garnett et al. (2018), Indigenous Peoples either manage or have tenure rights over land that amounts to more than one quarter of the global land surface, constituting approximately 40% of land that is currently protected or ecologically intact. IPLCs frequently have a rich set of relational values regarding nature and their interactions with it, and some of these are consistent with conservation, although often not as it has been practiced historically (via exclusion) (Chan et al., 2016; Pascual et al., 2017a). Involving IPLCs justly and

appropriately in conservation could help them manage other pressures, such as resource extraction, in a way that meets both local and global needs.

Possible points of action

Recent innovation amongst conservation organizations has seen investments in engaging local communities in exploring future scenarios to achieve conservation and development, thus involving communities at an early stage of conservation and sustainable development programs (Curran et al., 2009; Boedhihartono, 2017; Clarke, 1990; Chapter 6).

Needs remain, however, for measures to directly and indirectly address enduring negative consequences of conservation for local and Indigenous Peoples. Improved forms of community-based conservation might ensure that the rights of nature do not supersede human rights

(Hockings et al., 2006). For instance, conservancies established in Southern Africa have enabled local decision-making to be sustained across decades (Boudreaux & Nelson, 2011; Tallis et al.

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2008). Many countries are beginning to return land and forests to local communities and

indigenous groups. Notable successes have been achieved in the last decade, and wider adoption of such programs for forests and biodiversity conservation could address the issues raised here (Adams, 2001; Boedhihartono, 2017; Sayer et al., 2017).

Adaptive management (5.4.2.4) is viable when people are well integrated into the

social-ecological system being conserved, and distribution of economic and social benefits contribute to improve the lives of IPLCs (Berkes, 2004; Infield & Namara, 2008). There are examples of successful action drawing on traditional ecological knowledge and practice, which have been combined with western concepts of conservation to produce multi-disciplinary management outcomes (Gadgil et al., 2000; Huntington, 2000).

Enabling local definitions and targets for nature’s contributions to people is also key, especially those that go beyond market measures and enhance well-being (Sandifer et al., 2015). Working with locally-defined compensation and resettlement planning can help improve or restore livelihoods and development opportunities (Bennett et al., 2017; Vaclay, 2017). Compensation for crop losses can also improve support for conservation initiatives and is being widely used, though challenges remain (Nyhus et al., 2005; Karanth and Kudalkar, 2017).

In the rare instances where relocation appears necessary, fairness might dictate the suspension of processes if they cannot be realized well and fairly in an appropriate time frame (Hubschle, 2017). Strong stances against militarized and armed conservation will help restore deeply eroded people-park relations and ‘de-criminalize’ livelihoods (Duffy et al., 2014).

Schemes such as payments for ecosystem services are most likely to succeed in conditions where livelihoods are already relatively secure, and payments are supplemental and not a replacement for income or food security (Pascual et al., 2014).

The social complexities of landscapes can be integrated when designing compensation schemes for conservation at community levels (Wunder et al., 2008). It is inevitable that tradeoffs will occur between biodiversity and ecosystem service goals (Chapter 2.3), but these tradeoffs can be made fairly if addressed explicitly and democratically (Borrini-Feyerabend et al., 2013).

Last, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities can be integrated, along with other actors, in landscape-level governance through the recognition of both ancient practices and innovative mechanisms. The relationship between human activities and the environment also creates unique ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural patterns, and governs the distribution and abundance of local species, which are often described as cultural landscapes in western society (Farina, 2000;

Plieninger and Bieling, 2013). Exemplar practices exist in other parts of the world that represent harmonious interactions between humans and the nature such as Satoyama and Satoumi of Japan, Pekarangan (homegarden) of Indonesia, Chitemene of Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique, and are now collectively described as 'Social-Ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS)' (Takeuchi, 2010; Gu and Subramanian, 2014). Similarly, the framework and designation of the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) by FAO since

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2002 and the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI) since 2010 (Box 3.1, Chapter 3 for more detail) aims to identify and improve recognition about remarkable land-use systems and landscapes that have long provided various ecosystem services while contributing to biodiversity conservation and maintenance of Indigenous and local knowledge (FAO, 2010; Lu and Li, 2006; Nahuelhual et al., 2014).